Mahindra Racing today
said it has entered into a strategic partnership with Pininfarina and Tech
Mahindra under which it will get access to the Italian design firm’s expertise
and Indian tech major’s digital technology.

Besides, Pininfarina
will also become a sponsor of the Mahindra Racing Formula E team, Mahindra
Racing said in a statement.

Mahindra Racing is a
part of the Mahindra group and it competes in the FIA Formula E Championship.

“This (partnership)
enables the team to leverage Pininfarina’s legendary design and technology
expertise to enhance the performance of its M5Electro race car, currently under
development for Season 5 of the Formula E Championship which begins in December
2018,” it said.

This strategic
partnership is also “aligned to Mahindra’s vision of FUTURise, a creative
expression of how we are driving growth through world class innovation in all
our businesses”, he added.

The partnership will
also focus on other areas of design and technology, including Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

It will also help
Mahindra with its ‘Race to Road’ strategy that involves the application of
learnings from the race track into the development of new electric road
vehicles, in due course, the statement said.

Moreover, Mahindra
Racing will also have access to Pininfarina’s testing facilities in Italy which
will help the team enhance the aerodynamic efficiency of its race car, it said.

Tech Mahindra Chief
Strategy & Marketing Officer Jagdish Mitra said that by combining
Pininfarina’s design with Tech Mahindra’s digital expertise “we are
demonstrating how the products of the future will need to be adapted for a
convergent world”.

In 2015, Mahindra
& Mahindra Ltd and group firm Tech Mahindra Ltd had acquired 76.06 per cent
stake in Pininfarina.

SAINT PETERSBURG: A
homemade bomb blast at a supermarket in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg injured 10 people Wednesday, officials said, sparking a
probe into attempted murder.

"According to preliminary information, an explosion of
an unidentified object occurred in a store," a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigative
Committee, Svetlana Petrenko, said in a statement.

The blast was caused by a "homemade explosive device
with the power equivalent to 200 grammes of TNT filled with lethal
fragments," she said.

"The investigation is looking at all possible causes of
what happened," she said, adding that a probe for attempted murder had
been launched.

The incident comes several months after Russia's second city
was rocked with a metro bombing in April which killed 16 people and amid
concern that hundreds of Russian citizens who travelled to fight alongside
jihadists groups abroad could pose a mounting security challenge back home.

Rattled by a one-two
punch of betrayal and scandal, Donald Trump on Thursday tried to block the
publication of a bare-knuckle book that portrays his White House as a fetid
stew of backbiting, incompetence and dysfunction. The publishers
responded by moving the release date up by four days to Friday. Trump instructed his
lawyers to prevent the release of “Fire and Fury: Inside
the Trump White House” -- an expose by author and political muckraker Michael
Wolff -- which quotes key Trump aides expressing serious doubt
about his fitness for office. The book -- which
paints Trump as mentally unstable and far out of his depth -- quotes at length
his former ally and chief strategist Steve Bannon, who also received a “cease and
desist” order from Trump’s attorneys. “Your publication of
the false/baseless statements about Mr. Trump gives rise to, among other
claims, defamation by libel, defamation by libel per se, false light invasion
of privacy, tortious interference with contractual relations, an…